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Finding
Home (detail), mural by
Josh Sarantitis,
photo by Danny Birchall, Creative Commons License
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[This was originally delivered as a sermonic exploration on Sunday, January 20, at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville, Virginia.
If you would like, you can listen to the podcast.]
“New Beginnings”
– that’s the title of this exploration.
And I’ll confess that I almost didn’t have a sermon for you this
morning. Oh, this was one of those weeks
where I wrestled with the topic, danced with the topic, and just couldn’t find
a handle, couldn’t get a grip. I knew
that whatever tack I took there’d be those of you who’d be disappointed, who’d
wish I’d remembered to say something I left out, or who’d wish I’d said what I
said differently. And as I was writing,
I was right there with you.
I’d promised, in
the monthly bulletin, to tell you about efforts at moving beyond providing
temporary, short-term housing for homeless persons – which some are beginning
to see as, ironically, “enabling homelessness.” People are now suggesting that a better plan
is to get folks into some kind of stable housing as soon as is possible, rather
than making them go through a series of steps to demonstrate their
“worthiness,” because that stability is the best platform to build on. It provides a “new beginning” rather than a
temporary respite.
But try as I
might to write that sermon it just wouldn’t work. I sounded pedantic at best; at worst,
hypocritical. I’ll be honest, if you
were to divide the world into doers
and talkers I’d be a talker hands down. I’d like to do more, I really would, but my
default mode, and my real skills, are in the talking.
And I know that
if I were to talk about these things I’d be talking to a room filled with doers.
I mean, seriously, Kip Newland, Lynn King, Elizabeth Breeden, Jen
Larimer, Jill Mulligan, Edith Good, Achsah Carrier, Shirley Paul, other folks
I’m sure I’ve forgotten, and other folks I don’t even know about . . . these
people are up to their armpits in doing
something about homelessness in Charlottesville. They’re the ones to be talking about these
things. (And, in fact, they will be – in
the coming months the Social Action Council and the Adult Faith Development
Committee will be co-sponsoring a series of three workshops on homelessness
that sound really incredible. I strongly
encourage you to keep your eyes open for the details as they’re announced so
that you can participate. I think that
they’re going to be amazing.)
But I just
couldn’t write a sermon that made it sound like I was one of those doers, because I’m not. And when I thought about writing a sermon of
facts and figures, I remembered that there is a fantastic info-graphic hanging
on our Social Action bulletin board, just outside of the social hall and that
that picture conveys more than a thousand of my words ever could.
So then I
thought I could write a sermon that would encourage you to get involved. Besides the fact that that’d be a case of a
talker encouraging you all to be doers I banged into another problem. We’re already doing a lot in this
congregation. I’ve already mentioned
some of the folks who are kind of big-time players on this stage, but did you
realize that when we take our turn to host a week of PACEM – People and
Congregations Engaged in Ministry – that around 100 of us are involved in
seeing that our guests our fed and sheltered?
That’s about a quarter of our formal members! (And there’s a chance to be one of that
number when we host PACEM early next month.)
On top of that,
the TJMC IMPACT team is hoping we’ll have about 200 people at the big Nehemiah
Action on April 29th so that we can add our weight to the roughly
two dozen other faith communities who this year are trying to find some
collaborative solutions to homelessness in our area. So that’s nearly half of our membership getting involved!
And I’m hoping
that a whole lot of us are going to avail ourselves of the opportunity to be more
fully and deeply educated about these issues through that Social Action/AFD
program I mentioned a moment ago. And
I’d love to know that a goodly number of us take part in the annual “Point In
Time” survey that aims to get a fix on just how many unhoused people there are
in Charlottesville. (And there’s
information about the training for this effort in the insert to your Order of
Service.)
All this to say
that I couldn’t figure out a way to write a sermon that exhorted us to get more
involved. I’m sure we could – but I was
at a loss.
And then I
thought about Mike. Mike was this wild
guy I’d pass on the Boston Common when I was working at UUHQ, our Association’s
headquarters near the State House in Boston.
Mike was about my age, or maybe even a little younger, and had been
living on the street for a long, long time.
Everyone knew him. He’d call out
to just about every single person who passed him by. (And since he sat right near the entrance to
the T station that was a lot of people.)
He didn’t call out asking for money, usually. He’d just tell you that you were “lookin’
good.” Or he’d ask how you were
doing. Or tell you it was good to see
you. He’d shout out, “have a good day!”
Everyone knew
Mike – the vendors, the cops, the commuters . . . and nearly everyone who
worked at the UUA. I didn’t usually
carry cash on me, but I’d stop and talk with him most mornings. Sit with him.
I found that beneath the perpetual gregariousness and generosity of
spirit with which he greeted the passerbys there was also a weariness of soul
that so many people passed him by. I
never learned his whole story, but there was some substance abuse and some
unnamed mental illness. He’d been in and
out of shelters, in and out of treatment programs, in and out of the homes of
friends and family, but the streets were really what he knew. He knew which coffee shops would let you
nurse a cup of coffee for a couple of hours when it was cold outside, and which
ones wouldn’t. He knew which movie
theaters would let you stretch a single ticket into a triple bill when it was
raining. He knew when to be where to
increase the likelihood of scraping together enough money to be able to make it
through another day. Another night.
I grew to really
like Mike; to look forward to our encounters.
And when several weeks went by without seeing any sign of him I became
genuinely worried – I feared discovering that he had been arrested or, worse,
had died. But like I said, everyone knew
Mike and when I asked one of the Common’ cops he knew just who I was talking
about and was able to assure me that Mike had moved out of downtown because
he’d hooked up with a friend who had an apartment and was now spending his days
closer to there.
During the three
years that I commuted in to Boston from my home on Cape Cod I got to know a
couple of other guys I’d pass on my walk to and from my office. I don’t want to say “a couple of the other
homeless guys I’d pass on my walk” because while it is true that none of them
had a steady, stable home, to identify them first and foremost as “homeless”
would be like talking about my non-Hodgkin’s
lymphoma brother, or my bi-polar
friend, or one of you talking about your overweight
minister. Labels may be convenient, but
there is no person who can be neatly summed up with one. We are all far more complex than that.
And that brings
me to Shaggy. His spot was in front of
the Dunkin Donuts on the corner of Summer and Lincoln Streets. Thin, scraggly hair, skin like leather, bad
teeth . . . he could have been scary. I
bet he did scare some people. But I came
to know him to be one of the sweetest people I’d ever met. He didn’t engage people the same way Mike
did. He’d just stand there, cup in hand,
hoping that the people coming out of D & D’s might drop their change
in.
But as with Mike
I usually didn’t have cash on hand. But
it never felt right to just pass Shaggy by.
So many people were already doing that. So many people were already treating him as if
he were invisible; as if he weren’t even really there. And from somewhere in the recesses of my
Presbyterian/Methodist upbringing came the phrase, “And whatever you do to the
least of these, my brothers and sisters, you have done to me.” And so I’d strike up a conversation. I’d ask him how things were going, about
changes that were going on then in the response of the Boston PD to panhandlers. We’d talk about the weather and what that’d
mean to someone whose entire belongings could fit in a single pack. He explained to me how he used to try to
engage people – he’d had a million stories, most of them lies, about why he
needed some help at that moment. But the
dishonesty gnawed at him. So he gave up
the pretense. This was his life. He offered no excuses or explanations. He’d engage with people who’d engage with
him, just like most other people do.
Like I’ve said, I didn’t always carry cash, but I did remember to bring
him new gloves when a cold spell was settling in. And whenever I did have cash on me I made
sure that I gave some to him.
A year or so
previously Shaggy had found an Episcopal church with a real outreach to the
unhoused, and he’d really begun to turn his life around. He’d gotten off drugs and alcohol. He’d begun going to Capital Hill to speak out
about the issues of homelessness in Boston.
He’d begun doing some writing. As
I was getting ready to move from the Cape to . . . well . . . here, Shaggy’s
number was finally called up and he was able to move in to an efficiency
apartment. A couple of weeks ago I heard
a piece on homelessness on WBUR’s program “Here and Now” and I can’t tell you
how incredible it was to hear that familiar voice – Shaggy was one of their
guests! He’s still in his apartment
and, while it’s not always easy, he’s continuing to find solid footing.
A block or so
up, between the Wendy’s and the CVS on Arch Street, I got to know John. Brother John, I called him, because he was
always praying for me or asking me to pray for him. Somehow this felt right, this praying for
each other, this mutual blessing we would share. I came to learn that John had family, living
not so far outside of town, but he said he made them really uncomfortable. He never told me his diagnosis – or, maybe,
diagnoses – but it was clear that his life had unraveled some time before and he
had just never been able to knit the pieces back together. He didn’t want to be a burden to his family,
nor did he even want to inconvenience the other panhandlers on Summer Street
who would sometimes fight him for the prime spots. Brother John was one of the meek. It was clear to me that he was more than just
“a homeless person.”
And maybe that’s
the hook for this sermon this morning.
Maybe this is another in my ongoing series that I’ve been preaching for
nearly two decades now, the sermon that says “there is no us and them; there is
only us.”
But let me tell
you about Frank. I came out of a meeting
a couple of weeks back to be told that there was someone here who wanted to
talk with the pastor. (That usually
clues me in that it’s not someone from our “flock.” You guys hardly ever call me “pastor.”) Frank is a tall man, and from other
encounters with him here and in some of the other churches in the area I knew
he could be belligerent. Hostile. Threatening.
But on this morning he was calm.
So we talked.
He told me that
he’d made some mistakes in his life, spent some time incarcerated – “nothing I
lose sleep over now,” he assured me – and had had problems with substance
abuse. His family had cut him loose, and
he really didn’t have any other kind of support network. He said he’d tried going to couple of
churches, and the people had been real nice, until they learned that he’d spent
some time in jail and was currently homeless.
Then they got cold real fast. It
became clear to him that he wasn’t welcome as he was.
And that’s when
he said something that’s really struck me.
I think what he said can probably be interpreted in a couple of
different ways, and I have to say that I agree with both of them. After telling me how he’d felt the doors to
these other churches close on him when they discovered what was really going on
in his life, how he felt that as soon as people found out what his life was
really like they instantly began looking down on him, he said, “I always kinda
thought churches were supposed to be like hospitals.”
Now he might
have meant that like a hospital he’d thought that churches had to take you
in. And I do think that there’s some
truth to that. If South African
Archbishop Desmond Tutu is right that the church should be an “audio-visual
aid” showing what the world should be like, then there is some truth to
that.
But I prefer to
think that what he meant is that, like a hospital, a church is full of sick
people. This might sound surprising to a
lot of you . . . shocking even. And
wrong. I can imagine some of you
thinking that that just isn’t right – looking around you right now you don’t
any see “sick” people here. But we are
here. In every pew, if we’d be honest
with one another, and ourselves. Who
here isn’t – hasn’t been – wounded in some way?
Who here isn’t – in some way or other – even just a little bit – broken?
I’ve realized
that my lifelong sermon was only partially right. I’ve always said that there is no us and them, that there’s only us. But in my wrestling this week I’ve come to
realize that that still puts us – me – in the center of the circle and
subsumes those “others” into “my” sphere.
There is no “them,” I’ve said, there is only “us.” What I’ve realized this week is that there is
no “us,” there is only “them.”
The deepest call
of religion is not the recognition that “they” are “us” but the realization
that “we” are “them.” We all are
wounded. We all hunger and thirst. We all know what it’s like to be lost, alone,
alienated, homeless . . . if we’re honest with ourselves.
Yes,
homelessness is an overwhelming issue; it’s a challenge with too many facets,
too many interlocking pieces, an onion with too many layers. What can you or I do to solve such a thing?
But we can
address the separation. We can address
the exile. We can address the walls within ourselves that serve to maintain
the distinctions. I came to discover
that I’m not all that different from Frank, and Brother John, and Shaggy, and
Mike. Not that they’re not all that different
from me but that I’m not all that different from them. This
realization makes all the difference.
And that, I suppose, is the “new beginning” I was searching for.
In Gassho,
RevWik
PS -- all through the preparation of this sermon the song "Just a Bum" by the incredible Greg Brown kept playing in my mind. I kept trying to find a place to sing it, or at least to quote it, but I guess that's what a blog is for . . .
